2nd Grade

For this project, we took a look at some artwork by Wassily Kandsinky. Mr. Kandinsky was a Russian painter who was one of the first people to ever paint abstractly/non-representationally. He was largely influenced by music due to his synesthesia. Synesthesia is a condition in which one of your senses becomes activated due to the stimulation of another sense. So when Kandinsky heard music, he would oftentimes see colors and vice versa. ​

Four different classes said that I looked like Mr. Kandsinky. I guess that I found my doppelganger!

This is the work of art that we based our trees on.

We started off the project by learning about rainbows. This was pretty easy for the kiddos, as expected but I wanted to brush up on it just to be on the safe side. To paint the background, they used liquid watercolors. I LOVE liquid watercolors. Some of the colors were kind of faint so they don't look super bright. When painting, I emphasized that they should start their rainbow about a third of the way down their paper. From there it proceeded to orange, yellow, and green. Green was at the bottom of the paper. Then they carried their rainbow order back to the top of the page so that blue was at the very top and then violet. This was a way of creating a sunset by using the order of a rainbow. Then they used sponge brushes to add stems and leaves.

For the next class, they used oil pastels to create patterns on a piece of paper. Then they painted over the paper using two different colors. Lastly, they used paint scrapers to scrape designs into the paint, showing off their oil pastel patterns. This piece will turn into our butterfly later on. Then they began to cut out circles to be their flowers. We based our flowers on Kandinsky's Squares with Concentric Circles. They needed to add several circles to create each flower.

For the final day of the project, they cut apart their painted paper into a butterfly. We briefly talked about symmetry and how a butterfly has symmetrical wings. They used black colored pencils to draw designs onto the wings and to add a dotted flutter line behind the butterfly.